Chapter 3

After _Lohengrin_ the composer wrote nothing more for some years, though we may be sure he was eternally planning. He was intensely interested in politics. Revolution was in the air, and Wagner had to have his say on that as on every other topic. He made speeches and published pamphlets; and just as his musical schemes seemed wild to such contemporaries as the late Charles Hallé, so his ideas of social regeneration must have seemed Utopian to the point of sheer lunacy to the very comrades with whom he was acting. The explosion came; barricades were thrown up in the Dresden streets, and Wagner sought to bring about a quiet ending to the crisis by appealing to the Imperial soldiers to join with, and not to fight against, their own countrymen. Whether he actually shouldered a musket or not it is hard to say. This much is certain, however: that Wagner did take part in the rising, and that a warrant was issued for his arrest. The fiasco resulted in a great gain to music, and, as far as Wagner was concerned, there was no political loss. Had the insurgents by some unthinkable chance succeeded, he would soon have been on worse terms with them than ever he was with Kings and Imperial personages. They tried revolt because they wished to alter all the conditions under which men lived. Wagner, too, wanted to alter the conditions of life, but mainly with a view of carrying out his operatic reforms. Look where we will in his writings, we see that to be the secret of all his incursions into practical politics. Passionate--a bursting volcano of elemental energy--he was always a man of one idea at a time, and that idea always involved Richard Wagner playing an important rôle, for he was one of the most splendid egoists to be met in history.

ZURICH--PARIS (1849-1861).

He was now, indeed, in a pretty pickle. At Dresden he had an assured livelihood and time to write operas; and, despite his former experience of hunger and want, he threw away his position for the sake of an idea. He afterwards was wont to complain that he only wished to be kept alive in reasonable comfort, and he would in return present the world with masterpieces. Yet he was not content when he was, for a comparatively slight return in daily labour, kept comfortably alive. But, after all, what appears at first to have been an act of madness turned out anything but disastrous in the long-run. It is true that without the generous help of Liszt, Wesendonek and others he could not have lived as he did in Zurich, and, as it was, constant apprehensions of approaching poverty harassed him. The old fear of an empty belly which got into his very blood and bones in the Riga--Paris period now began to show itself in those appealing letters written to his friends when there appears to have been no necessity whatever. He had exaggerated hopes and exaggerated fears. The hopes were realized--as well as anything can be realized in this imperfect world--at Bayreuth; the fears found expression in the begging letters of which advantage was taken by every mean and cowardly spirit without the intelligence to understand his real greatness. Mendelssohn, we are reminded, wrote no such letters; but Mendelssohn, it may be remarked, was always rich, and has no such record of charitable deeds as stands to Wagner's credit. The nearest parallel to the case of Wagner is that of Beethoven in his old age. He, although perfectly well off, scared himself almost to death with his dread of poverty. Wagner's letters written about this time are well worth reading. There is no need to discuss them; they should be read and carefully weighed. Nor do I propose to spend any great space on the prose writings of the period. They are full of theories which were no sooner formulated than they had to be discarded in practice. At a time when Wagner was quite thoroughly misunderstood, the notion--perhaps naturally--became prevalent that he was simply completing a work commenced by Gluck. Now, no two men ever had more widely different aims than Wagner and Gluck. True, both wrote for the theatre, both employed singers and orchestra; and there the likenesses terminate. Gluck never sought to change the musical forms in use in opera. He retained the old recitatives, airs, concerted numbers, and choruses; not Handel himself clung more firmly to the old forms and formalities than Gluck did in _Orpheus_ and _Iphigenia_. He sought, in the first place, to substitute worthy and dignified subjects for the ancient frivolities which had inspired composers since opera became popular; he wanted those subjects treated in a sufficiently dignified way, and, above all, in a reasonable way; he resolved that his music should be worthy of the drama. No concessions were to be made to the prima donna or vain tenor: the music had to be dramatically appropriate. He got magnificent results; and when the leaven of Wagnerism has ceased to work and froth and bubble in the public brain--in a word, when Wagner's music is no longer mere exciting new wine, and we are as accustomed to it as we are to the music of Beethoven--then we shall turn back to Gluck (and also to Mozart) and find them as young and fresh as ever.

Wagner's aim was totally different. First, music, he held, was played out: one must have the spoken word with it. He went to the myth for subjects, and gave plentiful reasons, which need not detain us, for the choice. Then--and here the effect of his early association with the theatre shows itself--the music was in nowise to hinder the actor; therefore all formal set numbers must be discarded and replaced by his "speech-singing" expressive recitative which should be beautiful as sheer music, and not hinder the actors from playing their parts as well as singing them. And, finally, he came to the conclusion that in his music-drama he could effect a synthesis of all the arts. Music and acting were the basis; there had to be scenery, and the scenery must form pictures, with the figures always properly placed, according to what I suppose painters would call, or refuse to call, the laws of composition. But each of the figures, or groups of figures, on the stage had also to be regarded as an entity, and as sculpture had not to be excluded from the synthesis, the poses must always be sculpturesque.

Here was a programme indeed! Very fine it seemed to his young followers; when new it seemed wholly admirable. Unfortunately, as Wagner found, the moment it was tried it proved impracticable and useless. Take sculpture, for example. Sculpture, I take it, has reached a fairly high point when the marble figure gives one the sense of life and of motion. Wagner, with his sculpturesque poses, instead of letting the living figure give us directly the impression of life and of motion, sought (always theoretically) to attain the end by an imitation of an imitation. Moreover, no moving figure ever did or can suggest sculpture--even if we wanted such a suggestion, which we don't. Even the Commandatore in _Don Giovanni_, with the aid of stiff gestures and plentiful whitewash, ceases to look like a statue as soon as he opens his mouth to sing. Consider, too, the notion of making, so to speak, set pictures--of dealing, that is, with his puppets and scenery in exactly the opposite spirit to that in which he wished to deal with vocal music. A realistic picture suggests Nature, and if the figures are well done they suggest human figures; a well-arranged scene does the same. There was no reason for getting indirectly, again by an imitation of an imitation, an effect that can be got directly. As for producing a series of "composed" pictures, it was practically impossible and highly undesirable. A carefully-composed picture needs time for its appreciation, and no one could, or would, try to judge or be affected by an ever-changing series of pictures. Besides, if one did try, the attention would be hopelessly withdrawn from the main things--the drama that is going forward and the music. The picture plan is still tried at Bayreuth, with disastrous results. With the most beautiful scenery it would fail; and the Wagner family appear to be colour-blind, the magic garden, for instance, in _Parsifal_ looking like a cheap bed-hanging.

Then take, again, the set forms. Wagner eliminated the double bars and full stops, even as Beethoven had done, to an extent, in the "Heroic" Symphony, where theme leads into theme without a break; but his music is full of form, and also of forms, and the more he wrote the more careless he became about keeping up an appearance of continuity when vital continuity there was none. Wagner's forms were vaster than those of his predecessors; but for all that they are there.

Wagner's essays are worth reading by those who have the time and the physical and mental strength, if only because they reveal a man thinking on wrong lines while he is doing on right ones; but they are terribly long-winded, and many weary pages are devoted to demonstrations of the obvious or the actually fallacious. Mr. W. Ashton Ellis has given many years of a valuable life to translating them into something which is not English and not German. For the ordinary music-lover I believe the above summary will be sufficient to enable him to understand Wagner's aims at this period, and we shall presently see how far he was able to attain them, and to what extent they refused to be, and could not be, attained. The most valuable of his writings are those on conducting and on Beethoven. The latter has some bumptious and comical allusions to "world conquerors," the Germans suffering badly at the time from an attack of swelled head, subsequent to their defeat of the unhappy, unprepared French.

At Zurich Wagner was occupied with a multiplicity of other pamphlets, with conducting concerts, with his librettos, and so on. Hans von Bülow came to him as a pupil, and proved a devoted friend, afterwards letting him take his wife, Cosima, of whom he, Bülow, it is true, stood in no particular need. Wagner had sent the score of _Lohengrin_ to Liszt, and it was produced at Weimar in 1850. It presently went from opera-house to opera-house, and everywhere triumphed, so that a few years later Wagner could complain that he was probably the only German who had not heard it. In 1853 he published the words of _The Nibelung's Ring_, which aroused the premature ire of those who did not know how he intended to treat it musically.

I may here say that my ear is not sufficiently attuned nor my mind accustomed to the subtleties of German for me to offer any judgment on the prosody of Wagner's librettos. So far as I can understand them, they are uncouth enough. On the other hand, dramatically they are admirably constructed; and when we compare the words with the completed musical setting we can see how the drama was, so to speak, always latent; the words are as an invisible writing, on which the music is poured like a liquid, and out starts the drama, unmistakable and irresistible.

In 1855 Wagner went to London to conduct a season of the Philharmonic Society. That body invited him on the recommendation of Sainton, the violinist, and the season was one of its most successful. The feuds that arose, and the newspaper and other squabblings, have small interest for us now; but it is certain that the finer spirits appreciated, or partly appreciated, him, and Royalty flattered him. Into this period comes the Paris performance of _Tannhäuser_, which was a disgraceful failure--I mean disgraceful to the Parisians, and especially to their Jockey Club, which resolutely went to work to prevent the music being heard by cat-calls and shoutings. The event was not of any great artistic importance--indeed, it is hardly worth calling an event; it was only one more sin on the soul of a musically benighted people.

Wagner's prospects were still of the poorest; he was still living mainly on charity; but in 1859 he had finished _Tristan_, and much of the _Ring_ was sketched or actually written. He was amnestied and free to return to Germany, and he could do little good there. _Tristan_ was accepted at Vienna, but the production was put off. He was busy on the _Mastersingers_--busy with all manner of impracticable dreams, and could not earn a livelihood. His concert tours brought him little or no profit; in Paris a series of concerts cost him 10,000 francs, and where on earth he found the money I do not pretend to know. He was fifty-one years of age; his fortunes seemed at their very worst, the outlook was of the blackest, when of a sudden all was changed. King Ludwig of Bavaria sent for him, and promised to help him in every possible way. He had many rebuffs to face, but from this time (1864) his ultimate victory was assured.

MUNICH--TRIEBSCHEN, 1864-1871.

From the outset squabbles and intrigues made Wagner's life bitter. He did not do things by halves, and when he had succeeded in getting the music school of Munich re-organized to suit his wishes, with Bülow as chief director, the local musicians felt they had little cause to love him. Bülow was appointed kapellmeister of the Court Theatre; reforms, peculiarly disagreeable to those reformed, were set on foot; and singers, players, _régisseurs_, who had anticipated sleeping away their existence in the good old fashion, were violently awakened by this reckless adventurer, charlatan, and what not, who had won the King's ear. The invertebrate flunkeys attached to every Court were jealous of his influence over the King, and did what they could to hinder the execution of his plans. But Wagner was not the man to be hindered, and if these backboneless crawling things made life at Munich so loathsome to him that he sought peace to complete his work at Triebschen, near Lucerne, nevertheless his plans were carried out. _Tristan and Isolda_ was produced in 1865 and _The Mastersingers of Nuremberg_ three years later. If I had space, it would be amusing to quote the contemporary criticisms passed on the first. _Tristan_ was hopelessly misunderstood at the time, and even now it is misunderstood by many professed Wagnerites. It created an uproar in Germany; in England our sires were too busy singing the oratorios of Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn to pay any attention.

_Tristan_ was the first opera to be finished after Wagner had published his many theories, and it was their completest refutation. He himself wrote afterwards that in composing it he found how far he had gone ahead of his doctrines; but, as a matter of fact, he had not gone ahead of them at all: he simply forgot all about them, and composed as if they had no existence. In no opera in the world is there such an entire absence of the calculation that working to a theory would have involved. It is the most intense and, to use Wordsworth's word, the most inevitable opera ever written. Words, music and action seem to have originated simultaneously in the creator's brain. Writing to Liszt, Wagner said he meant to express a love such as he had never experienced. It was as well that he never experienced it: no human creature could endure the strain for twenty-four hours. Here we have the elemental passion of man for woman and woman for man in a degree of intensity that is nothing less than delirium. The action is simple, the story is simple. Isolda has nursed Tristan when he was picked up wounded; she has loved him and he has loved her. He has killed her betrothed, Morold, and she conceives it to be her duty to kill him, but she cannot. Tristan dare not aspire to win her, and when she is claimed by his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, he is sent to bring her. At this point the opera opens.

The prelude begins with one of the love themes; other themes are worked in; the parts weave and interweave with each other, swelling and mounting until a shattering climax is reached; then all subsides, and an effect of terrible suspense is produced by the last subdued phrase in the bass as the curtain rises, and we feel that something tragic is to come. Here we have Wagner the full and ripe musician. As a technical achievement this prelude is marvellous; the polyphony is as intricate and yet as sure as anything in Bach or Mozart, part winding round part, and each going its way steadily to the climax; and the white-hot passion expressed by this means makes the thing a miracle. There is nothing like it in _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. Here we are entirely free of the Weberesque four-bar phrases; the rhythms are subtle and complex, though to the ear they sound clear and simple enough. When the curtain goes up we see a sort of tent arranged on the deck of a ship. From aloft a sailor chants a wild sea-song, unlike any sea-song ever chanted off the stage and yet redolent of the sea and salt winds.

Isolda is lying on a couch, her face buried in her hands; Brangaena stands by. In the sailor's song she has fancied some gibe at herself, for she is being carried off against her will by the man she loves to wed an old man she has never seen. She starts up in rage, and then, realizing her position, asks Brangaena where they are. Now, Wagner, if he scarcely considered the prima donna, took great pains with the lesser characters, and Brangaena never opens her mouth without giving us something of magical beauty and tenderness. Quite unconscious of the impending tragedy, she remarks that they are drawing near Cornwall, and that before evening they will land there. The gently-rolling sea is kept before us by an accompaniment made out of a phrase of the sailor's song. "They will land"--that means to Isolda that she will become the property of the old man she has never seen, and lose for ever the man she has no hope of gaining, the man whom she has every good reason to hate and despise. This is a drama of passion pitted against reason--against everything excepting passion, and Wagner loses no chance of making the situation clear. Here, as in every other opera, he is, if not first a dramatist, yet always a dramatist. "Never!" screams Isolda, and curses the vessel and all that it holds. Astounded, Brangaena tries to comfort her; but Isolda is a woman, and means to have her way. There must be plenty of air in such a deck-tent, but Wagner, with a spite that is itself somewhat feminine, makes her, in feminine fashion, complain of a want of it; so one of the curtains is drawn aside, and she can see what she wants to see: Tristan standing on what seems to be the prow, but is really the stern, of the vessel. There he stands, the man she hates and loves, and shows no sign of discomposure, although the helmsman invariably holds the tiller at such an angle that the ship must be gyrating like a teetotum, thus offering a simple, if coarse, explanation of Isolda's qualms. The music up till now has been made up of the fragment last quoted of the sailor's song, and one of the love themes--a simple phrase of four notes, out of which lengthy passages are woven. When the curtain is drawn a fragment of the sea-song is again heard, and then this love phrase is taken up by the orchestra and filled with sinister, smouldering passion. Isolda's anger gathers and mounts against Tristan, and when this theme arrives

it is the announcement of her determination that death for both of them shall end an impossible situation. This, however, we do not learn until later; for the moment the theme conveys little special meaning to us. It is when we hear the drama a second time that its appalling tragic force is felt. Isolda tells Brangaena to command Tristan to come to the pavilion. Kurvenal, his servant, sings a scoffing song, in which all the sailors join, in spite of Tristan's endeavour to stop them. Brangaena rushes back and hurriedly closes the curtains. Isolda, half-crazed, tells the whole story as it occurred previous to the rising of the curtain--how she nursed the wounded Tristan, found him to be the slayer of her betrothed, took his sword and was about to kill him, when he opened his eyes, and the sword dropped from her listless fingers. Brangaena is sufficiently astonished; Isolda works herself up into a paroxysm of fury; and now the drama is indeed on foot. Brangaena has a long, lovely, soothing passage to sing, and in her over-anxiety to serve her mistress she accidentally suggests to Isolda the very means of revenging herself on Tristan, and terminating at the same time her own misery. "You remember your mother's art," says Brangaena: "do you think she would have sent me over-seas with you without a means of helping you?" Isolda knows it is the love-potion she means. She has only to drink the contents of a small flask, and old King Mark will become at least tolerable to her. The flask is in a casket, and another is there, as Isolda knows, full of a deadly poison. She commands Brangaena to pour out the poison. Brangaena, terrified, beseeches, implores; but Isolda insists; and in the midst of the dispute the sailors suddenly roar out their "Yo-heave-ho!" The sea had ceased, as it will in moments of preoccupation or intense emotion, to haunt our ears for a time; now it breaks in again, and we feel as if it had really never ceased. Kurvenal enters, and tells them to get ready to land. Isolda tells him point-blank that she will not stir until Tristan has come to demand her pardon for a sin he has committed. Brusquely, Kurvenal says he will convey the message; Brangaena again prays to her mistress to spare her. "Wilt thou be true?" replies Isolda; and the voice of Kurvenal is heard: "Sir Tristan!"

A minute of frightful suspense occurs while Isolda is waiting for Tristan; and, as the situation is to be one of the most poignant in the drama, it is only fitting that Wagner should prelude it with one of his most tremendous passages. Isolda tells Tristan what is his crime, and how she had meant to slay him. He offers her his sword to carry out her old purpose, and she laughs at him. "A pretty thing," she says, "it would be for me to go to King Mark as his bride with his nephew's blood on my hands. We must drink together to our friendship, that all may be forgotten." Brangaena has been tremblingly preparing the potion, and, not knowing what to do--not daring to give the poison, not daring to disobey her mistress--she has poured out the elixir of love. Isolda hands it to Tristan, who fully understands Isolda's meaning and half of her intention--if, indeed, there is another half, for Wagner has given Isolda a true touch of womanly character in leaving it uncertain whether or not she really means to poison herself. He takes the cup and drinks; she, with a cry of "Betrayed, even here!" snatches it from him and drinks also.

Here we have got many leagues away from _Lohengrin_, with its scene between a man and a jealous, ungenerous, querulous woman, and _TANNHÄUSER_, with its contest between an impossible platonic affection and piggish lust. There is not a touch of staginess about Isolda; she was not born in the green-room. In her we have two elemental passions in conflict--her love for a man, and her hatred for the same man after he has shown manly gratitude by preparing her a lot that is loathsome to her. The character of Tristan is not so transparent or simple. He had loved Isolda--so much is certain; but whether he gave her up to curry favour with the King (he himself says as much afterwards), whether he dares not ask for her for himself, whether he does not know that Isolda loves him--about all this we know nothing.